Colorization Feedback Wanted

[down2earth2]

I would of liked to do the colorization contest, but I have a bunch of my own I want to do. Here's my second and third efforts, and any helpful feedback would be most welcome. The one is my great-grandmother. I started with a xerox copy of the original photo. I'd include the original scan, but I've trashed it. The Thai woman is from a wallet-sized photo. Wish I knew how to do one of those rollover things. They're so cool. I'm not sure how large of an image I should download. Well here goes.

[castortroy]

oh my god i'm scared of you.... This is nicely done. the only thing i see is wrong is the coloring near the hair line. You can use selective feathering and the smudge tool to blend it a little better. You can also make the gold nice and shiny by lowering the opacity of it a little and adding some white highlights on a new layer and setting the blendmode to overlay and lower the opacity....

[Dave]

The Thai woman is great .... the halo background needs toning down so she stands out more Your granny needs more skin tones and the background needs colouring or faking entirely, it looks bad.

Don't know what you mean by rollover, unless you mean mouseover ..... to link the image. If so see the "Vb" and "Img" links at the bottom left it spells it out for you,

[down2earth2]

[QUOTE=castortroy]You can also make the gold nice and shiny by lowering the opacity of it a little and adding some white highlights on a new layer and setting the blendmode to overlay and lower the opacity....[/QUOTE]

Now that you mention it, the gold does look totally flat. Great suggestion.

[QUOTE=castortroy]The only thing i see is wrong is the coloring near the hair line.[/QUOTE]

I struggled a little with the hairline. I did come up with a new extraction technique for the wisps of hair on her forehead. The PS extraction tool was doing a really lame job. With her dark hair I thought if I could just select everything lighter than the hair and delete it, I'd have the extration. I fould just the tool in Select>Color Range! Worked pretty well (better than PS extract anyway).

[QUOTE=Dave]Your granny background needs colouring or faking entirely, it looks bad.[/QUOTE]

You're right. It looks bad. I guess I was thinking I was keeping the character of the original photo.

[QUOTE=Dave]Don't know what you mean by rollover, unless you mean mouseover ..... to link the image. If so see the "Vb" and "Img" links at the bottom left it spells it out for you,[/QUOTE]

Yes! Rollover! I just went to the [img] at the bottom of the page, but dang if I understand it exactly. I sort of see that I could add a link to some text in my message, but how would I link to a photo, when the photo doesn't show up until after I hit "Submit Reply"?

[Dave]

It's a little bit tricky, consider instead of using the text as the link that you put in an image as the link .... does that make more sense?

So .....

[*url=http://source of full size image][*img]http://source and filename of small picture to appear in post][*/img][*/url]

Just loose the asterisks and insert appropriate http codes.

[swillox]

Hi down2earth2,....

I tried something with your post, (rollover) but it seems image ready won't save original colours in a gif format... It's diffusing the whole thing...

Can anyone tell me if it's possible to keep original colours or has .gif to be indexed colours every time??

[Dave]

Gif files are limited to 256 colours so it wont keep the originals from a jpg file. The only way I know of to achieve a b&w to color image view would be to have a mouseover (java)script to switch between the files.

[down2earth2]

[QUOTE=swillox]Hi down2earth2,....

I tried something with your post, (rollover) but it seems image ready won't save original colours in a gif format... It's diffusing the whole thing...[/QUOTE]

Very cool Swillox! Maybe It wouldn't have diffused so much if it was made a gif from the original instead of going from the original to jpeg (save for web) to gif.

[PDG]

This is all fantastic work. I'm truly impressed! :cool2: